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Monday, July 30, 2012

Well, I was going to do a post on the reorganization of our garage but we are having major water heater problems. So needless to say, my garage looks like a tornado hit it! What a mess! And it is not going to get fixed until this weekend. We are going to attempt to do this ourselves and I hope all goes well. If you have any advice in this area, throw it our way! Or if you just want to tell us how crazy we are to do it ourselves, you can do that too! Hopefully next week I can get my garage back to being an organized and water free space! Until then, here are some pics from Pinterest of really nice and organized garages!

Sunday, July 15, 2012

Hello everyone. The summer is just flying by right? As the old saying goes, Time flies when your having fun! My kids and I spent last week in my hometown of Brenham Tx with my mother and grandma. We went here and there and everywhere. It was lots of fun. While I was there I decided to clean up and re-organize their kitchen pantry some. Here is a look at the before:

I had actually organized this space a few years ago and it has not been gone through since. I took everything out first and wiped down the shelves with soap and water.

I went through all the packaged food and canned foods to throw out anything that was expired. I also emptied jars that had little in them and those were cleaned to place new food items inside.

What a difference. This is a great space and works really well when items are visibly seen. It does have some deep corners and things can get lost or placed behind something else. I used larger items in the corners where I could to prevent this from happening. I still would like to work on the floor area and those green plastic stacked shelves in the middle that sit on the floor. It just doesn't work for the space but it will have to wait for my next long visit.

In this picture you can see the canned goods stacked and easy to see and access. The next shelf down are condiments and sandwich spreads, crackers and a jar of snacks. The last shelf down are bags of beans and pastas, boxes of dry mixes and two baskets with packaged items. The pastas and beans made it into the containers that were cleaned after I had already taken pictures and then my camera went dead. But it looks nice I promise!

The top shelf here is the plastic goods. Next shelf boxed items and some baking goods. Jar on the end holds coffee. The next shelf are breakfast cereals, and more baking goods with some in jars. The last shelf holds a basket with misc. items and a big box of my grandma's medicines. I plan on getting something smaller and more friendly to look at soon. The big box is a BIG EYE SORE!

I wanted to point out something in this picture specifically. The little basket with apples on it holds taco seasoning. When I was cleaning out the pantry, I found like 7 or 8 packages of the stuff. I found several packages of coconut and lots of other items that had more than one duplicate. My grandma, who is an amazing cook, tends to forget what she has bought because she cannot see what she already has in the pantry and just buys more of the same. Do this over and over and you get lots of opened items all over the place. Not good when it comes to storing food. I told her what I had done in the pantry(she looked at it later on her own because I was a little nervous that I had moved her stuff) and that the way I organized it would help her to see what she had and if she needed to purchase more or not. I told my mom I was going to go through their kitchen pantry at least twice a year just to make sure this was working for them and to make revisions if does not.

Here is another look at the before and after side by side:

BEFORE AFTER

I just wanted to say that I did not spend a dime on this re-organization. It just needed to be cleaned out and updated. Being organized does not always have to cost money. Just some of your time and hard work will do.

I hope everyone has a great week. Take a little time to organize if you can. It will make your week that much better!

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Hope everyone is having a great summer! I have been toting kids around and just being a big time summer bum! It was a long school year and this momma was feeling blah! We have been keeping the kids busy with swimming, parks and lots of friend time! The big guy is doing lots of camps this year and was just given his first musical instrument a guitar!!! He will start taking lessons next week. We are super excited! I mean, he is super excited! Anyway, just wanted to say hello out there and I am still here! Just in summer mode! Here are a few pics of the kids having some fun!